I'm in a job search at the moment, and pretty much every time I raise the possibility of working remotely (hellish commute for any jobs in nearest big city) I can hear my resume hitting the circular file over the phone. Most workplaces do not value employees as the asset that they are, but instead view them as walking cost centers who work as little as possible not out of valuing their time appropriately, but out of spite for their employer. The first rule of managing costs is know what is going on with the things that cost you money, and most short-sighted employers interpret that to mean "breathe down their necks to intimidate them into working harder than they should for the money we're paying them."
Some employers are enlightened and make it work, others see a request to work remotely as sandbagging and an excuse to goof off instead of working. These places only think you're working if your butt is in the seat where they can see it.
Sounds like he is in the USA, and it's not the norm for full-time employees to have any sort of real 'contract' past signing something saying they read the employee handbook. It's not binding.
Everything is networked because doctors want it that way. 'Networked' has an 'ooh shiny' factor that doctors love. That's bad enough, but when you combine it with the fact that nobody is stingier or dumber with IT resources than hospitals, you get a recipe for disaster.
Those in power usually *don't* understand. They have people for that. I've worked for a few Fortune 500 companies in IT; at one, the CEO's password was the name of the company and set to never expire. At another, when I tried to educate a user on how to avoid a particular problem (so that the problem wouldn't happen again, and lead to their loss of productivity and an increase in my workload) and was dismissed with a wave of the hand and a "Oh, I don't have to know that."
They don't understand. They don't WANT to understand. And when your job title has a "Chief" at the beginning of it, IT goes along with whatever insecure, dangerous, counterproductive nonsense you want.
You do understand that the only thing that's going to change is the way that some people buy insurance, right? That government is not going to have a bigger hand in healthcare than it already has? That the exchanges exist to allow people to buy individual insurance from the big private insurers like Blue Cross, Tufts, and so forth? That the 'public option' died an ignominious death before the ACA passed? That insurers are still free to charge whatever exorbitant premiums they like, so long as they spend at least 80 cents on the dollar on actual care and not executive bonuses? That insurers will still be free to assign whatever arbitrary "guidelines" they like regarding what THEY think is appropriate care (instead of, say YOUR DOCTOR)? That government subsidies to the poor so they can afford coverage are really just Medicaid reconfigured (in other words, the taxpayers were paying for their insurance ALREADY)?
The ACA makes some minor changes to the rules about when a private insurer can decline to insure someone (no exclusion for pre-existing conditions, no lifetime caps on coverage, etc) but that's really about it. While it's not going to impact quality of care, it also isn't going to fix the thing that is REALLY wrong with healthcare in the USA: Companies and shareholders can make money off of other people having cancer. For-profit companies shouldn't be able to enter the healthcare market. Their profit motive (spend as little on care as you can) puts money in the pockets of the rich while denying prescription formula to starving babies.
If you read the phrase "Government takeover of healthcare" without instantly thinking "Well that's total bullshit" please punch yourself in the crotch.
I didn't say that. A lot of people didn't say that. For years conventional wisdom was that you don't put anything in an email you wouldn't want on the front page of the New York Times, because the system was largely insecure. Back in the day it was because lots of email was sent over the wire in the clear; today, it's because lots of people use 'free' email services (including myself) and private companies cannot be trusted to keep your information secure, no matter what their 'security policy' might say. What's the downside to Joe's Web-Based Email ignoring its own self-declared privacy statement? Nothing, really; they might lose some customers, but largely nobody understands/gives a shit about the issues involved.
You can do that as long as your boss knows your passion and enthusiasm would work just as well for someone else, and you remind them of it constantly. Otherwise, bend over.
No, if you like your job, and your boss knows it, he/she knows that he/she doesn't have to work as hard to keep you happy and productive. Ergo, they don't have to pay you as much to keep you.
Yes, your experience is universal and the vast majority of employers aren't evil money-grubbing bastards that will screw you at every opportunity, no matter what the industry.
The business world IS engaged in an overall betterment of humanity.
Sure, if you define 'humanity' as 'the leeches at the top of the org chart who don't do any actual work'.
the worst thing a company could do to its employees is not turn a profit
An oversimplification. You're not wrong, but the problem isn't that cut and dried. It depends on how they turn a profit. If they sacrifice long-term viability to make the quarterly statement look better, yes, they're turning a profit, but eventually the bad choices will catch up with the company - but by then the people who made the bad choices have long since pulled the ripcord on their golden parachutes and left the rank and file out of a job. I would argue that a better business model is not only to turn a profit, but give the employees a stake in the company's success beyond "you get to keep your job."
"Following your interests" is usually incompatible with "paying your bills". If someone knows you've got an interest in the material beyond just getting paid, they will pay you less (or at least try to.) "Liking your job" is just code for "Please screw me out of money at every chance you get."
Seriously, can we all drop the xenophobia and realize that America is losing jobs because it's becoming less competitive
I don't think anyone with a brain doesn't think that America is less competitive these days. It's our reaction to the issue that's really the problem. The powers that be in the boardroom are under the impression that the way to become more competitive is to pay their workers less. Lowering salaries makes the field less attractive to graduates with enormous student loan debt, so the supply of talent starts to dry up. At that point, the boardroom decides that the way to fix that problem is not to make the jobs more attractive to talented engineers, but to find more workers willing to accept the lower salaries. It's not a direct correlation, but you do tend to get what you pay for. In turn, this lowers quality and increases manufacturing costs due to the necessity for re-work of inferior designs. Profits dry up, and the boardroom again decides the way to become more competitive is to lower salaries even further. Lather, rinse, repeat.
In a sane world, students wouldn't graduate with six figures of student loan debt and it would be possible for them to accept lower salaries. It's not unwillingness to take the lower salaries, it's a necessity when you've got a $1,200 student loan payment to make each month. So, either college needs to become less expensive (it's taxpayer-supported in other countries) or companies need to find talented students that they can assist in getting that degree, and therefore cultivate a smarter workforce. But that requires money up-front, and with our current 'this quarter is the only thing that matters' mindset, it's unlikely to happen.
To get there, you need enough developers to keep up with the flow of tickets. And as we all know, hiring enough staff to reasonably handle the workload is a concept that is mostly foreign to most for-profit businesses.
Not to mention the 'horse-to-water' problem with a formal ticketing system. If you have a phone, and they know your extension, they'll just call you directly instead of, you know, actually doing anything. And unless you've got C-level buy-in on the ticketing system, telling the user to go open a ticket is usually a Career Limiting Event.
No, the way to enforce usage of a ticketing system is to not tell the users about any other way to contact you.
Morals are expensive. If you can get the same work for less money (by using a VRP) then you're doing it right, as far as the organization is concerned. They don't care about anything else.
Point is: minus the exemptions, employees indeed ARE required to pay overtime.
Perhaps, but that doesn't mean they do. They just make you an "exempt" employee and demand that you work as much as they tell you to, whenever they tell you to do it. Plus, even if it is an illegal act, who's going to complain? People who want to be fired on a pretext complain. Yes, retaliation is illegal. Good luck proving it.
And you're forgetting that "computer professionals" are specifically mentioned in the legislation as being exempt from overtime pay.
RTW is fine, if your goal is to destroy the union. Faced with the choice of (effectively) higher pay or union membership, new employees will take the money. They will also be "strongly encouraged" by management to choose to not join the union, lest their hiring paperwork be 'lost'. Or, they might be less subtle, and ask the prospective employees if they plan to join the union when they conduct the interview, and mysteriously not hire the ones that do.
Using cheap labor doesn't necessarily mean lower prices for consumer goods. It just means that more money stays in the business' pockets. They'll still charge you the price that they'll think you'll pay. Businesses don't base their pricing on how much it costs to make the widget, they base it on what they think you'll pay for it. When you hear "Buy American", what you're hearing is a business that doesn't want to compete on price, they're keeping their (more expensive) pricing in place and raising your "balk" price instead by appealing to your sense of patriotism.
Case in point: I was shopping for a compact car last year; one of the cars I looked at was the Ford Focus. I rejected it mostly based on price; it was about $3000 more than the other cars I was looking at. Now, Ford has posted record profits and recent years; they could price the product more competitively, but they'd rather base their pricing on the fact that your jingoism is worth another couple thousand bucks. (Ironically, while I did buy a Mazda, Ford owns a big chunk of Mazda and the 3 is based on a Ford platform.)
This has nothing to do with skill and training, its more about saving money.
Bingo. Big Business doesn't like it when supply and demand works against them. Developers are in-demand, and usually when something is in-demand, the price for that thing goes up (in this case, salary and other compensation). They hate that. Money is for the executive golden parachutes, not the people who do actual work. So, by increasing the supply, you tend to lower upwards salary pressure. It's the same reason why they love H1-Bs so much; they'll accept lower pay, which has the effect of downward pressure on salaries.
However, it's all kind of based on a false premise anyway: the impression that they want you to have that there aren't any workers with the required skills to fill the jobs. This is bullshit. The problem is that there aren't enough workers with the required skills that are willing to accept the money the employers think they're worth (which is waaay below market). So, Big Business whines to their (wholly-owned) elected representatives to get more H1-Bs, and in addition they sponsor programs like this to give the students the impression that they "owe" them something in the form of taking a lower salary. It's all just about money; there's no philanthropy here.
The third thing is that these businesses don't feel your computer science degrees are all that important anyway.
Yes, and no. It's important to them that you have the debt that usually accompanies a college degree; the degree itself, as you indicate, is meaningless. People with huge non-dischargeable debt are more willing to put up with poor treatment by their employer. If you're debt-free, and your boss tells you you now need to do the work of three people, you can much more easily tell him to fuck off as compared with someone who owes $60,000 in student loans.
When it comes to technology... the feel they can get anyone to do this work.
The concept of the 'worker as interchangeable cog' meme is not specific to the tech world, as you probably know already. Case in point: The nurse population is rapidly greying in this country. Nurses that have four decades of experience tend to be at the top of their salary range. Hospitals look at that and say "Why are we paying this one person so much when we can hire three CNAs to do the same work?" The difference is that CNAs are intended to be assistants, which is what the A in the acronym is (Certified Nursing Assistant). They're not intended to provide care themselves; they're trained to do things like clean toilets and rooms in a care-ready way. But all management sees is dollars and cents; at the vast majority of hospitals, the administration has put patient care on the permanent back burner in order to focus on what they really care about: money. Hospital administrators typically are lawyers and accountants, they have no ethical responsibility to the patients. They also see nurses as interchangeable; they see nothing wrong with a nurse that's worked in oncology for twenty years being told to fill in in the ICU. After all, a nurse is a nurse, right?
Not to whine, but every coder I've ever shown this code has 1) recoiled in horror, and 2) agreed with me that it's an untestable mess that needs to die in a fire.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in a job search at the moment, and pretty much every time I raise the possibility of working remotely (hellish commute for any jobs in nearest big city) I can hear my resume hitting the circular file over the phone. Most workplaces do not value employees as the asset that they are, but instead view them as walking cost centers who work as little as possible not out of valuing their time appropriately, but out of spite for their employer. The first rule of managing costs is know what is going on with the things that cost you money, and most short-sighted employers interpret that to mean "breathe down their necks to intimidate them into working harder than they should for the money we're paying them."
Some employers are enlightened and make it work, others see a request to work remotely as sandbagging and an excuse to goof off instead of working. These places only think you're working if your butt is in the seat where they can see it.
Working at home is not for everyone. It sounds like you're not doing a great job of managing it.
Sounds like he is in the USA, and it's not the norm for full-time employees to have any sort of real 'contract' past signing something saying they read the employee handbook. It's not binding.
80 euro / m? Do you know what the government subsidy is on that?
I ask because my insurer claims to need $1,200 (906 euro, currently) a month to cover me and my family. Two orders of magnitude doesn't track for me.
Everything is networked because doctors want it that way. 'Networked' has an 'ooh shiny' factor that doctors love. That's bad enough, but when you combine it with the fact that nobody is stingier or dumber with IT resources than hospitals, you get a recipe for disaster.
Those in power usually *don't* understand. They have people for that. I've worked for a few Fortune 500 companies in IT; at one, the CEO's password was the name of the company and set to never expire. At another, when I tried to educate a user on how to avoid a particular problem (so that the problem wouldn't happen again, and lead to their loss of productivity and an increase in my workload) and was dismissed with a wave of the hand and a "Oh, I don't have to know that."
They don't understand. They don't WANT to understand. And when your job title has a "Chief" at the beginning of it, IT goes along with whatever insecure, dangerous, counterproductive nonsense you want.
You do understand that the only thing that's going to change is the way that some people buy insurance, right? That government is not going to have a bigger hand in healthcare than it already has? That the exchanges exist to allow people to buy individual insurance from the big private insurers like Blue Cross, Tufts, and so forth? That the 'public option' died an ignominious death before the ACA passed? That insurers are still free to charge whatever exorbitant premiums they like, so long as they spend at least 80 cents on the dollar on actual care and not executive bonuses? That insurers will still be free to assign whatever arbitrary "guidelines" they like regarding what THEY think is appropriate care (instead of, say YOUR DOCTOR)? That government subsidies to the poor so they can afford coverage are really just Medicaid reconfigured (in other words, the taxpayers were paying for their insurance ALREADY)?
The ACA makes some minor changes to the rules about when a private insurer can decline to insure someone (no exclusion for pre-existing conditions, no lifetime caps on coverage, etc) but that's really about it. While it's not going to impact quality of care, it also isn't going to fix the thing that is REALLY wrong with healthcare in the USA: Companies and shareholders can make money off of other people having cancer. For-profit companies shouldn't be able to enter the healthcare market. Their profit motive (spend as little on care as you can) puts money in the pockets of the rich while denying prescription formula to starving babies.
If you read the phrase "Government takeover of healthcare" without instantly thinking "Well that's total bullshit" please punch yourself in the crotch.
I didn't say that. A lot of people didn't say that. For years conventional wisdom was that you don't put anything in an email you wouldn't want on the front page of the New York Times, because the system was largely insecure. Back in the day it was because lots of email was sent over the wire in the clear; today, it's because lots of people use 'free' email services (including myself) and private companies cannot be trusted to keep your information secure, no matter what their 'security policy' might say. What's the downside to Joe's Web-Based Email ignoring its own self-declared privacy statement? Nothing, really; they might lose some customers, but largely nobody understands/gives a shit about the issues involved.
You can do that as long as your boss knows your passion and enthusiasm would work just as well for someone else, and you remind them of it constantly. Otherwise, bend over.
No, if you like your job, and your boss knows it, he/she knows that he/she doesn't have to work as hard to keep you happy and productive. Ergo, they don't have to pay you as much to keep you.
Yes, your experience is universal and the vast majority of employers aren't evil money-grubbing bastards that will screw you at every opportunity, no matter what the industry.
Oh, wait..
Sure, if you define 'humanity' as 'the leeches at the top of the org chart who don't do any actual work'.
An oversimplification. You're not wrong, but the problem isn't that cut and dried. It depends on how they turn a profit. If they sacrifice long-term viability to make the quarterly statement look better, yes, they're turning a profit, but eventually the bad choices will catch up with the company - but by then the people who made the bad choices have long since pulled the ripcord on their golden parachutes and left the rank and file out of a job. I would argue that a better business model is not only to turn a profit, but give the employees a stake in the company's success beyond "you get to keep your job."
"Following your interests" is usually incompatible with "paying your bills". If someone knows you've got an interest in the material beyond just getting paid, they will pay you less (or at least try to.) "Liking your job" is just code for "Please screw me out of money at every chance you get."
I don't think anyone with a brain doesn't think that America is less competitive these days. It's our reaction to the issue that's really the problem. The powers that be in the boardroom are under the impression that the way to become more competitive is to pay their workers less. Lowering salaries makes the field less attractive to graduates with enormous student loan debt, so the supply of talent starts to dry up. At that point, the boardroom decides that the way to fix that problem is not to make the jobs more attractive to talented engineers, but to find more workers willing to accept the lower salaries. It's not a direct correlation, but you do tend to get what you pay for. In turn, this lowers quality and increases manufacturing costs due to the necessity for re-work of inferior designs. Profits dry up, and the boardroom again decides the way to become more competitive is to lower salaries even further. Lather, rinse, repeat.
In a sane world, students wouldn't graduate with six figures of student loan debt and it would be possible for them to accept lower salaries. It's not unwillingness to take the lower salaries, it's a necessity when you've got a $1,200 student loan payment to make each month. So, either college needs to become less expensive (it's taxpayer-supported in other countries) or companies need to find talented students that they can assist in getting that degree, and therefore cultivate a smarter workforce. But that requires money up-front, and with our current 'this quarter is the only thing that matters' mindset, it's unlikely to happen.
To get there, you need enough developers to keep up with the flow of tickets. And as we all know, hiring enough staff to reasonably handle the workload is a concept that is mostly foreign to most for-profit businesses.
Not to mention the 'horse-to-water' problem with a formal ticketing system. If you have a phone, and they know your extension, they'll just call you directly instead of, you know, actually doing anything. And unless you've got C-level buy-in on the ticketing system, telling the user to go open a ticket is usually a Career Limiting Event.
No, the way to enforce usage of a ticketing system is to not tell the users about any other way to contact you.
Morals are expensive. If you can get the same work for less money (by using a VRP) then you're doing it right, as far as the organization is concerned. They don't care about anything else.
Perhaps, but that doesn't mean they do. They just make you an "exempt" employee and demand that you work as much as they tell you to, whenever they tell you to do it. Plus, even if it is an illegal act, who's going to complain? People who want to be fired on a pretext complain. Yes, retaliation is illegal. Good luck proving it.
And you're forgetting that "computer professionals" are specifically mentioned in the legislation as being exempt from overtime pay.
RTW is fine, if your goal is to destroy the union. Faced with the choice of (effectively) higher pay or union membership, new employees will take the money. They will also be "strongly encouraged" by management to choose to not join the union, lest their hiring paperwork be 'lost'. Or, they might be less subtle, and ask the prospective employees if they plan to join the union when they conduct the interview, and mysteriously not hire the ones that do.
So instead of doing anything, you'd just rather bitch on Slashdot.
5/10 troll harder.
So what's your solution?
Using cheap labor doesn't necessarily mean lower prices for consumer goods. It just means that more money stays in the business' pockets. They'll still charge you the price that they'll think you'll pay. Businesses don't base their pricing on how much it costs to make the widget, they base it on what they think you'll pay for it. When you hear "Buy American", what you're hearing is a business that doesn't want to compete on price, they're keeping their (more expensive) pricing in place and raising your "balk" price instead by appealing to your sense of patriotism.
Case in point: I was shopping for a compact car last year; one of the cars I looked at was the Ford Focus. I rejected it mostly based on price; it was about $3000 more than the other cars I was looking at. Now, Ford has posted record profits and recent years; they could price the product more competitively, but they'd rather base their pricing on the fact that your jingoism is worth another couple thousand bucks. (Ironically, while I did buy a Mazda, Ford owns a big chunk of Mazda and the 3 is based on a Ford platform.)
I think you're replying to the wrong comment, I'm not saying anything about American workers vs. foreign ones.
Bingo. Big Business doesn't like it when supply and demand works against them. Developers are in-demand, and usually when something is in-demand, the price for that thing goes up (in this case, salary and other compensation). They hate that. Money is for the executive golden parachutes, not the people who do actual work. So, by increasing the supply, you tend to lower upwards salary pressure. It's the same reason why they love H1-Bs so much; they'll accept lower pay, which has the effect of downward pressure on salaries.
However, it's all kind of based on a false premise anyway: the impression that they want you to have that there aren't any workers with the required skills to fill the jobs. This is bullshit. The problem is that there aren't enough workers with the required skills that are willing to accept the money the employers think they're worth (which is waaay below market). So, Big Business whines to their (wholly-owned) elected representatives to get more H1-Bs, and in addition they sponsor programs like this to give the students the impression that they "owe" them something in the form of taking a lower salary. It's all just about money; there's no philanthropy here.
Yes, and no. It's important to them that you have the debt that usually accompanies a college degree; the degree itself, as you indicate, is meaningless. People with huge non-dischargeable debt are more willing to put up with poor treatment by their employer. If you're debt-free, and your boss tells you you now need to do the work of three people, you can much more easily tell him to fuck off as compared with someone who owes $60,000 in student loans.
The concept of the 'worker as interchangeable cog' meme is not specific to the tech world, as you probably know already. Case in point: The nurse population is rapidly greying in this country. Nurses that have four decades of experience tend to be at the top of their salary range. Hospitals look at that and say "Why are we paying this one person so much when we can hire three CNAs to do the same work?" The difference is that CNAs are intended to be assistants, which is what the A in the acronym is (Certified Nursing Assistant). They're not intended to provide care themselves; they're trained to do things like clean toilets and rooms in a care-ready way. But all management sees is dollars and cents; at the vast majority of hospitals, the administration has put patient care on the permanent back burner in order to focus on what they really care about: money. Hospital administrators typically are lawyers and accountants, they have no ethical responsibility to the patients. They also see nurses as interchangeable; they see nothing wrong with a nurse that's worked in oncology for twenty years being told to fill in in the ICU. After all, a nurse is a nurse, right?
Not to whine, but every coder I've ever shown this code has 1) recoiled in horror, and 2) agreed with me that it's an untestable mess that needs to die in a fire.